raghu wrote:
No BS, but IMHO it is a scam by the academic-industrial complex to get lots of research money from the Federal govt. I believe it is supposed to be a ground-up redesign of the TCP/IP protocol suite that powers the Internet, to support much faster speed backbones and quality of service. It is a scam because "if it ain't broke, why fix it"? But then the original ARPANET and the Human Genome Project to name just two examples also were similar scams that did amount to something in the end.. so who knows..
. D/ARPANET was intended to be the "Nuclear war communications backbone", not really a scam, the dire need WAS felt in the 50s and early 60s. The idea was: You could blow up a whole section of the US, and flexible routing would "fix it", whereas "Bang Paths" (Me!Intermediary1!Intermediary2!IntermediaryX!You... FidoNet style) were too prone to ...unh... losing intermediaries... if the aforementioned disappearance of a vast section of the United States should occur. ARPANET was serious biz, soon to backbone the mil-ind-edu complex's design communication as well, although the *really* serious biz was always within couriers distance... Silicon Valley was the hub of many of those companies, as well as the companies spun off to personal computers later (from missile design, communications, guidance, Moffett's "Blue Cube"), because they could run top secret blueprints and prototypes across town, or across the Ave. I used to have a satellite map of the Bay Area showing all the companies, with their histories and interlinkage in my cubie. That's one end result of the "End of the 'Cold War'", you can HAVE a satellite map of silicon valley. It all revolved around the "Blue Cube" at Moffett Field (Who infamously burned out thousands of garage door openers in South San Francisco during a microwave communication experiment gone awry) As recently as the 1980s, Russian citizens and others needed special permission to be in the Silicon Valley. Now, with AOL,Yahoo!, others, mostly all civilian use is channeled into a 'hub' for redistribution. Not too many folks out there with a terrabyte of disc space available for a DNS list of every Internet address on the planet. The flexibility was lost, if only due to 'scaling' issues. The bottom line is I guess it would depend on what they are intending to ...fix.. with I2? I was using jnos, script-driven tcp/ip on amateur radio bands in the late 80s, early 90s. The scripts were plain-text. Someone fixed... elaborated... on the original, for the better. Tcp/ip with better native domain/user tracking would be one way it could be... worse... ...for privacy. Leigh http://leighm.net/
